“A Girl in Exile” is a retelling of the Orpheus Eurydice legend in the context of Albanian totalitarianism. Recasting classical myths and totalitarianism are apparently themes in other works by the renown Albanian author Ismail Kadare.

Here the prisoner of death is Linda B., a woman infatuated with the principle character Rudian Stefa, a known Albanian playwright who borders on dissidence and is paranoid about incarceration by the State. Linda B. has never met Stefa and engages her girlfriend Magena to get her an autographed copy of one of Stefa’s books. Magena has a relationship with Stefa and Linda B ultimately commits suicide. In a dream sequence Stefa tries to marry the dead Linda B., who plays the Eurydice role.

Linda B.’s family tries to retrieve her interned body from the State cemetery. The point of the novel is captured in this sequence: you are a prisoner of the State in life and in death.

“The Albanian regime was tottering but its laws remained in place, especially the regulations governing prisons and internment. One of these laws was extremely strange, and many people believed it must be unique to Albania. This law concerned political prisoners and internees who died before completing their sentences. Their bodies, even though vacated by their souls, had to continue serving their sentences in the grave, wherever they happened to be, until the end. Only after the expiry of the term of their sentence did their families have the right to exhume them from the cemeteries designated by the state, and take them where they wished.”

The plot and characters in this novel are both thin and contrived. Mr. Kadare’s other works may be better than this novel. If it wasn’t 184 pages I would have given up on it.

Colin Thubron is one of England’s foremost travel writers. This skill is reflected in “Night of Fire”, his first novel in fifteen years. The plot is thin and irrelevant. It is structured as a biography of the fictional tenants of a Victorian house that is burning down. The characters are the landlord, a failed priest, a naturalist, a photographer, a boarding school boy and a traveler. For most of the novel it seems to be a collection of short stories. However, it seems more complex as it slowly progresses.

A theme may be expressed in one line of one of the last stories. “We say that life is a burning house.” What “life” is may be existential. Science is juxtaposed against religious belief, and comparative religious beliefs yield alternative views of reality and existence. In the end, you are not sure if you have read multiple fictional biographies, or a composite of a single life.

Parental abandonment is a common theme in many of the stories. It made me wonder, if the novel is partly autobiographical or merely consistent with the novel being about one life.

The novel begins and ends with the landlord. He is an astronomy buff, and is peering at the celestial wonder of the universe. His other interests align with the other tenants. He is watching a rain of fire in the sky-sixty Quadrantids from a nova that left a dark void.

The Protestant seminarians in the chapter about the Priest, are mostly broken children who are searching for their parent or parental approval through the church. Their theology is confronted by Orthodox Christianity at the monasteries near Mount Athos and by the Rwandan refugees in Tanzania who blend the teachings of the Church with their own orthodoxy. Some find the monasteries to be “a mirror of the celestial world, following a changeless scheme.” The Protestants separate from the dead. For the Orthodox Christians the soul is embodied within the body and the dead are connected to the living.

“The church in this inflamed light, was becoming as they wished: the refraction of God’s universe, inhabited less by men- who had grown small in His worship- than by the supernatural populace looming from the walls and columns, ignited by human prayer, and growing minute by minute closer and more alive.”

The converted refugee Tutsis, consistent with the storytelling of African custom, revel in the Bible, but not in the sermons. They have absorbed more life suffering then can be preached. They have “no concept of repentance or salvation through Christ. Their faith is a narcotic.”

Is belief and memory just a state of mind? Is the world created and destroyed in the brain? The chapter about the neurosurgeon is consumed by these questions. He is to operate on a man who believes he communicates with God through his seizures and is concerned that the neurosurgeon will “cut God out of me with your knife.” The surgeon explains the anatomy of God.

“Rational ideas of God evolve in the frontal cortex, Mr. Peters. The occipital lobe may anthropomorphize God, and the limbic region supply emotional experience of Him. Suppressed activity in the parietal area can induce the conviction of unity with the divine.”

The tenant Stephanie is a lepidopterist. The younger, ignored daughter of a deceased mother and a father who was cold to her. She finds wonder and beauty in the creation of butterflies. She finds love with an older woman. She is the exception to the postulate that the novel is about one life.

The photographer lives in a world of illusions. Like Stephanie his reality is altered from his practical and successful older sibling. His relationships with women reflect his image of them, not what actually appears. Before he is consumed by the fire his drug induced dream has his memories being extracted by forceps, one by one, from his surgically opened head, until his empty shell of a body is suspended and rotates to gaze at him.

The schoolboy chapter continued the theme of children that are mentally or physically separated from their parents. Here the child was placed in an English boarding school while his parents lived and worked in Cyprus. He tried to convince the Head of the school and his classmates that they died. He was reprimanded by the school and his more responsible older brother. He dreamed of a different existence.

“He used to imagine himself a great surgeon who restored the dying, or a missionary leading peoples to God. Nothing was too hard for him. He became a photographer whose creations outshone real life, and an explorer or naturalist who disappeared into the unknown and returned with butterflies as huge as eagles.”

The Traveller ties the other biographies together into a novel and not a group of short stories. An old monk in Tibet conveys a different understanding of life, memory and God.

“Yet no soul existed. There was no lasting human essence, they said. Only the journey itself, the karma of cause and effect. ..”We don’t believe in the existence of God. There is no Creator. There are gods who aids to understanding, but they die. They are illusions.'”

“The world began to thin and vanish with the illumination that led at last to nirvana. It was the self that created its surroundings. And the self too was an illusion: the greatest of all. It was meditation.. that brought this purified vision.”

“‘When people dream … they imagine that all sorts of desires and terrors are real. But then they wake up. The ‘I’ is like that too. It is dreaming illusion.'”

This novel would have been a wonderful companion when I toured Prague. It is a beautiful city.

This novel is not a travelogue, as you might expect from Paul Theroux. It is atmospheric if you have visited the locale. The prose weighs more to story than descriptive of venue. It traces the search for a music score of presumed importance through Czechoslovakia, London, New York, the Czech Republic and the Mid-West of the U.S..

Otylie, as a young girl is given the score by her ethnically Czech father before he returns to the World War I battlefield. Her father was a collector of musical scores and he tells her to protect the score at all cost. He never returns. Although she does not music, because her father told her that music and war are associated, she obeys his wishes. With the onset of the Nazis into Prague she separates the score, giving each movement to her husband and a friend to protect it from the Nazis and later from the Russians. Her husband dies and people are displaced, so Otylie only has one of the movements.

Meta a young musicologist in New York City is given one of the movements by an elderly friend of Otylie before she dies. Irena requests Meta to find Otylie, recover the other movements and to return the entire sonata to Otylie if she is alive. The novel traces Meta’s efforts to do this.

The story is imbued with classical music history from the 18th Century. There are flashbacks, providing clues to the mystery and adding depth to the characters. The prose serves the story, with much use of dialogue. There is coverage of some of Meta’s romantic relationships along the way, but these serve the story as a whole.

For some, the 500 page novel is too long, but I thought this novel was a page-turner. It has commercial possibilities as an Indie film. It is not “art”, but is an entertaining good read.

What we have in Pascale Kramer’s “Autopsy of a Father” is a failure to communicate on a familiar and societal level. Set currently in and around St. Etienne in south central France near Lyon, it was a region near the center of the Vichy government during World War II. Not a liberal region, the father, Gabriel, was a liberal journalist, whose defense of two local boys who murdered an immigrant from Comoros, is reviled by his former colleagues, and quietly supported by his neighbors. He is found dead, purportedly a suicide, soon after his estranged daughter and deaf grandson visit him. The daughter, an intellectual and social failure in the eyes of her egotistical and narcissistic father, is divorced from a Balkan Muslim, who unexpectedly shows up for the funeral preparations, along with the father’s controlling ex-wife from a locally superior economic and political class, and her brother. There is some financial issue about a Degas that has gone unaccounted for from the estate.

Death can bring out the worst in families, particularly when it is dysfunctional in life. The lack of communication breeds distrust, and communication feeds the flame.

This short novel starts a little slow, but rapidly becomes a page-turner. Ms. Kramer builds and maintains the tension throughout, with the politics of prejudice being an undercurrent. It indirectly raises the question whether prejudice more easily evolves when one bears the brunt of immigration, then those who unaffectedly theorizes about the impact of immigration on local communities. It is unclear, whether the victim was in France illegally or was an African legally living in predominantly white rural France. It is unclear if he was Muslim as most are. The murder was clearly unprovoked and there is no mention about what impact immigration had on the community, other than the resulting prejudice. These questions are left for the reader.

The prose is in service of the story and character development. A third-party narration, the novel is told from the daughter’s perspective. I have read a number of publications of Bellevue Literary Press. They tend to publish good works.

Deservedly Short-Listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize, Mohsin Hamid’s “Exit West” traces the displacement of a muslim couple, Saeed and Nadia, from an unnamed country beset by militant muslim fundamentalism across the West. The author refers to them as migrants, not refugees. The artifice for transportation are doors, ignoring the travail of the journey, and focusing on the personal and cultural divide of displaced people in a foreign environment. This teleporting, like Alice through the Looking Glass, is what makes this novel arguably experimental, in a year in which playing with the novel format seem to matter for the Man Booker Prize jury. The novel form is intact unlike other candidates which alter the life path of the principal character, or are more stream of consciousness. The others for me were more gimmicks, but here it maintained the focus on the characters and the universality of the refugee condition. I am more concerned with the author’s description of them as “migrants” and not “refugees”, as the theme, in part, is “Here, but for the Grace of God”. The doors are not a one-way ticket.

There is also strong character development. Saeed and Nadia are different people who manage to stay together despite, or perhaps because of, the pressures of their circumstance. Time and environment do however take their toll.

LIke other candidates for the Man Booker Prize this year, Mr. Hamid is a successful and well-known author who has been Short-Listed for the Prize before, as well as having been a recipient of other literary prize.

I have been rather disappointed by this year’s selections for the Man Booker Prize, although I have not read all of them. Some were good books, but not ones I thought were exceptional. One, which I partially reviewed, I could not get through at all.

I enjoyed this novel and its fresh approach toward the refugee crisis. You might too.

If length is the criteria for this year’s Man Booker Prize, then at nearly 900 pages Paul Auster’s “4321” justifiably is on the Long list. Otherwise this coming of age third person narrative that chronicles post-World War II American history through the eyes of a liberal Jewish boy growing up in the Metro New York City area is not deserving. is journeyman prose and unrealistic protagonist(s) with literary aspirations, is complex, but unsympathetic.

The twist is that there are actually four principal protagonists intertwined with essentially the same ensemble of characters, each with slightly different life paths. If you had not read any reviews of this book, the book jacket, or the last six pages of the book, you would think that the editor and author missed a lot of logical and factual inconsistencies throughout the book. In the novel there are no clear lines of demarcation between each variation of the lives of the principal character, Archie Ferguson. Sequential flashbacks complicate the reading of this novel. Neither the experimental nature of the organization of the novel, nor the theme that each of our lives can take different paths, warrant the inclusion of this novel on the Long List.

For baby boomers who have lived through the American history that the lives of Archie Ferguson trace there is no new information to learn from this book.

At about half the length the book may be tolerable. For me it was a waste of time.

“Autumn” by Ali Smith is the only work of hers that I have read. She again is Long Listed for the Man Booker Prize. I have no idea why, except that it is a novel of British nostalgia and currency in a year the Long List is dominated by established writers. The platform that Ms. Smith uses for this tour is the life-long relationship between a British child,Elisabeth, and her elderly neighbor,Mr. Gluck, who expands her life horizons despite the obstacles of her mother. These obstacles include the generational conflict about Brexit, including immigration. The child become woman is the narrator. There are also vignettes about Christine Keeler, Pauline Boty and Pop Art and musings about life as Mr. Gluck lays dying. Ms. Keeler and Ms. Boty connection is the latter’s work “Scandal ’63” which captured the Profumo Affair which involved Ms. Keeler.

I previously reviewed “Days Without End” which is also Long-Listed this year. It is far superior work of literature.

Long Listed for the Man Booker Prize this year Sebastian Barry’s “Days Without End” is a saga about survival and savagery of mid-19th century America toward Native American Sioux and Yurok, and each other through the beginning of Reconstruction in West and border states of Tennessee and Missouri. Told in first-person narrative by Thomas McNulty, it traces the harsh life he and his lover John Cole led from homeless Irish orphans to drag performers and soldiers in Union army.

In part it is a tale of Irish immigrants who survived the Potato Famine. The author is no flatterer of Irish prejudice, even among the morally pure. It can be learned merely by living, not only by the Irish.

” I don’t trust anyone. What we walked through was the strike-out of her kindred. Scrubbed off with a metal brush like dirt and dried blood on a soldier’s jacket. Metal brush of strange and implacable hatred. Even the major. Same would be if soldiers fell on my family in Sligo and cut out our parts. What that old ancient Cromwell come to Ireland he said he would leave nothing alive. Said the Irish were vermin and devils. Clean out the country for good people to step into. Make a paradise. Now we make this American paradise I guess. Guess it be strange so many Irish boys doing this work. Ain’t that the way of the world. No such item as virtuous people.”

The author has a gift with language. It almost masks the brutality. Thomas McNulty is a narrator who is both gripped and numbed by war and survival. The novel builds to a more emotional conclusion, narrowly circumventing some movie-like pathways.

I have not read the other Long Listed novels, save for one I am in the middle of. This novel is far better and is worthy of being Short Listed.

About 80% through “Sudden Death” the author, Álvaro Enrigue, admits he does not know what his book is about. He just knows he was mad. Mad because in every game the bad guys have the advantage.

This too, is probably not true.

He does tell you it isn’t a book about Caravaggio or Vasco de Quiroga; Cortés or Cuauhtémoc; or Galileo or Pius I; although they are all characters. The book is not about the birth of tennis, although Caravaggio and Quiroga are engaged in a duel by tennis, the reason for which they were both to drunk to remember. It is not about the Counter-Reformation, the Council of Trent, or Carlo Borromeo, although the period of the novel is a bookend that squeezes the life out of the Renaissance. It is not about the ironic use of Thomas More’s Utopia by the conquistadors in New Spain.

It ends with art maybe being the salvation of history. The ending, maybe the only weak part of the book in my view.

The inspiration for the novel was the exhibit at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City, “El vuelo de las imágenes. Arte plumario en México y Europa 1300 – 1700” [Images take flight: feather art in Mexico and Europe]. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPZxD9D84ZI

This novel is a work of incredible imagination. Scalped hair is substituted for feathers in the composition of the tennis ball. It is made from the hair of the beautiful, but unlucky, bride of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn. The scapular worn by Cortés and ultimately by Quiroga in his tennis match, was cut from the hair of the emperor Cuauhtémoc after Cortés had him killed.

The author dedicates the book to La Flaca Luiselli. This is likely intended affectionately to his wife, the author Valerie Luiselli, the other half of this esteemed Mexican literary couple. I previously reviewed her experimental novel “The Story of My Teeth”, a collaboration with factory workers.

Carlos Fuentes, who I think writes some of the best first paragraphs in modern fiction, has an apt description of “Sudden Death”.

“Enrigue belongs to many literary traditions at once and shows a great mastery of them all… His novel belongs to Max Planck’s quantum universe rather than the relativistic universe of Albert Einstein: a world of coexisting fields in constant interaction and whose particles are created or destroyed in the same act.”

The novel is part art criticism of Caravaggio’s paintings. Some real, some imagined. “Caravaggio was to painting what Galilei was to physics: someone who took a second look and said what he was seeing, someone who discovered that forms in space aren’t allegories of anything but themselves, and that’s enough; someone who understood that the true mystery of the forces that control how we inhabit the earth is not how lofty they are, but how elemental.”

This novel is a whimsical romp through late Renaissance political, art, Catholic, and social history with a tour through Spain’s vanquishing of the Aztec empire in Mexico. They are equally bad guys to the author.

The chapter “Regarding Most Popes’ Utter Lack of a Sense of Humor” is about Cardinal Montalto.

“… Montalto also spent those years planning how the city would look it really was the center of the world- a plan he executed with violence and perfectionism once he was named Pope Sextus V. He invented urbanism, though his name wasn’t Urban. It goes without saying that he never played pallacorda. The fact that no subsequent pope was called Sixtus after Montalto, who was the fifth, is proof that the Catholic Church is an institution without a sense of humor.”

The novel was awarded the Herralde Prize in Spain and the Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award in Mexico. Forget get the awards. If you admire good con- artistry and illusion you should read this book. It is fun, entertaining and educational in the same time and space.

Anyone who lives in Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge or Staten Island New York will instantly recognize the characters in Louisa Ermelino’s short story collection “Malefemmena”. These Italian-American women could be type cast in a female version of “Goodfellas”. These are women who are subservient and independent. It is a genre that may have had more public appeal in the 1950s and 1960s, but these are all good stories.

There is also an international flavor to the stories, that reflect the author’s time spent in India after college. The women have some abandon within the limited confines of the restrictive Asian societies for whom white women have some allure. Some are borderline junkies, others find comfort in the attraction of other women.

The author can be funny. In an otherwise very tender story that celebrates a long marriage, her daughter recalls a joke told by her mother who is near death.

“Now my mother, this woman I’ve loved my whole life is leaving me. To go where? Heaven? Might all those St. Peter jokes about the pearly gates be true?

St Peter greets you at the gate and invites you in for dinner. He serves you tea and toast. Wait a minute, you say. Tea and toast? This is heaven?

I know, St. Peter says, but it just doesn’t pay to cook for two…”

The story is accurately reflect life experience as it is leaving.

“I called hospice and the dying went into full gear. It’s wonderful, the attention you get when you are dying, the attention you cannot have when your life is still open-ended.”

“I called the undertaker and I realized that undertakers come when you call. You don’t have to wait until morning or leave a message. Someone always answers. The undertaker always comes. Things move smoothly around death.”

I could not help thinking that Ms. Ermelino had contractors on her mind when she wrote that.

The author is the Reviews Director for Publishers Weekly, so she should have a lot of contacts. Most of the stories published in this collection were published in Indie Presses: Black Warrior Review; The Malahat Review; Prarie Winds; River Sytx.

While I enjoyed all the stories, my second favorite was “Sister-in-Law”. She is a real malfemmena.